The Sinking of the RMS Titanic and other ships.

[Adam Went]

Have searched through several of my Titanic-related books overnight and found mentions, though only fleeting ones, of James Dobbins. It seems that the accident was at the time somewhat swept under the carpet, the celebrations of the launch still very much going ahead with Lord Pirrie and so forth.

Having said that, no doubt Thomas Andrews would have been very upset at the news - he cared deeply about the men who worked for him and was far ahead of his time in terms of worker rights.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Natalie Severn]

Thanks Robert and Adam.I don't believe James Dobbin jr was a nurse actually Robert.He was engaged on work on the development or building of aircraft according to my grandmother.

[Robert]

Hm, well, maybe I've got the wrong one.

[louisa]

I first became fascinated with the story of the Titanic after I watched the movie "A Night To Remember" with Kenneth More (as Lightoller).

I know it was made for pennies and some scenes could have been filmed in a bathtub, but for me it is still the best Titanic movie.

They got a few details wrong though - as have successive movies. They promoted Lightoller to first officer when in fact he was second officer at the time. Lightoller actually had a west country accent, he wasn't posh like Kenneih More.

Murdoch was actually a hero and didn't shoot himself or anyone else for that matter.

[Adam Went]

Hi Louisa,

Definitely agree with you that A Night To Remember is the best Titanic film to date, and certainly the closest to historical accuracy.

However I think you might be a little confused.....I remember Kenneth More portraying Charles Lightoller as the Second Officer, rather than First, which is historically accurate. Double checked on the IMDB page and it confirms it:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051994/

Kenneth More just got "more" screen time because he was the star of the film.

Also, I don't think Murdoch fired his pistol AT anybody, but there was certainly witnesses who described guns being fired to keep panicking passengers away from storming the remaining few lifeboats towards the end, and it was the officers who had these firearms distributed to them earlier on for that very purpose.

It was Lightoller who would eventually become one of the heroes of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940....

Cheers,
Adam.

[louisa]

Hi Adam

I'll stand corrected on that point then.

I found the James Cameron movie to be full of discrepancies too. However when did Hollywood ever let the truth stand in the way of a good story?

I think Kate Winslet was mis-cast. She looked a bit too old for little Leo DiCaprio. The way she kept scooting along the decks of the Titanic was irritating, almost as though she was on castors.

There is also no way that a woman of those times would ever have worn a low cut dress, especially during the day. Even the street walkers (remember the Ripper victims?) used to wear high buttoned dresses. And as for that 'finger' sign she gave - well that would never have happened, would it?

The most irritating part was the old lady throwing the sapphire necklace into the ocean. She could have given it to a good cause, silly old biddy!

Also the producers should have chosen an old lady with brown eyes (like Kate Winslet's - not somebody with bright blue eyes.

I'm glad to have got all that off my chest!

[kensei]

Murdoch was actually a hero and didn't shoot himself or anyone else for that matter.

I remember reading somewhere that a witness told of seeing some officer or maybe just some crewmember shoot himself but that it was impossible to tell who it was. That, combined with the fact that Murdoch did not survive, was apparently good enough for Hollywood. Am assuming also that the person he shoots in the movie (Tommy) was a fictional character, wasn't he?

[louisa]

Nobody shot anyone on the Titanic.

I remember reading that the relatives of Murdoch were very upset at his portrayal in the movie. I think he has a statue in his honour, in his hometown somewhere in Scotland.

[Adam Went]

Hey all,

Louisa:

Wow, you'd make a particularly scathing movie critic!

I do agree with you for the most part about James Cameron's film though, i'm not one for long, soppy romantic stories and there was a little too much of that. But apart from that it wasn't too bad.....it was certainly a hell of a lot better than the mini-series which was made featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones a year earlier, in 1996....blurgh!

Cameron certainly redeemed any small flaws his film may have had though with his docco film Ghosts Of The Abyss a few years later......if you haven't seen that, do yourself a favour. It's the Titanic like you've never seen before and almost certainly never will again.

Kensei:

Fairly sure Tommy was a fictional character, though in a bit of an ironic twist, they discovered after the movie was released that Jack Dawson was actually a real person and he was a lowly crew member on the Titanic. IIRC the producers claimed they had no knowledge of this, just another one of those odd coincidences which seem to surround major events like the sinking of the Titanic....

Cheers,
Adam.

[kensei]

Louisa:

Kensei:

Fairly sure Tommy was a fictional character, though in a bit of an ironic twist, they discovered after the movie was released that Jack Dawson was actually a real person and he was a lowly crew member on the Titanic. IIRC the producers claimed they had no knowledge of this, just another one of those odd coincidences which seem to surround major events like the sinking of the Titanic....

Cheers,
Adam.

I had heard that about Jack Dawson, and also that he is buried in a cemetery in Newfoundland I believe (?) that is kind of considered to be the Titanic cemetery where many bodies that were able to be recovered were buried, and that after the movie came out so many fans came to visit his grave that damage was done to it. Poor guy. Jack Dawson is, though, a fairly common name and it's not that surprising that Cameron would have made it up only to find there really was someone on the ship with that name.

[Adam Went]

Hi Kensei,

Just off the top of my head, are you thinking of the cemetery at Halifax, Nova Scotia? A huge amount of the victims are buried there and there was in fact a program a while back which was seeking to use modern DNA technology to exhume and then identify the remains of those who are buried in unmarked graves there. I know that they were successful in some cases, which is fantastic for the descendants of those who died in the tragedy.

Also, just in other news, I hear that new exploration of the Lusitania wreck (or what's left of it, it's a mess) is underway/about to get underway.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Jason]

not sure if this has already been mentioned, so forgive me if it has. Some years i saw a programme which said that a Russian vessel had recovered a body entombed in the ice of a berg, and that the body appeared to be from a person who had died on the Titanic. I never heard anything else about this since.Anybody know of this story ?

[Mayerling]

not sure if this has already been mentioned, so forgive me if it has. Some years i saw a programme which said that a Russian vessel had recovered a body entombed in the ice of a berg, and that the body appeared to be from a person who had died on the Titanic. I never heard anything else about this since.Anybody know of this story ?

Hi Jason,

I am sorry to say that this probably was a journalistic hoax. There was such a story in one of the worst American super-market tabloids in the late 1990. Hardl a month passes without these idiots publishing some new "scoop" about Titanic, JFK'S assassination or relationship with Marilyn Monroe (or her death), Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, and Hitler (or Bormann) hiding or having died in Paraguay or the Amazon areas. I heard on the radio station WOR FM back in the midst 1990s the then host of the morning show (John Gambling II) interviewing the editor of the rag about such a headline. The editor enthusiastically insisted the items were wonderfully true.

Jeff

[Adam Went]

Sounds like a bad mash up of the movie "Raise The Titanic" where the Russians are involved and the Americans raise the Titanic in search of some rare mineral that supposedly went down with it and there's a bloke entombed down there in some watertight compartment and it turns out the mineral isn't with the body at all, just gravel, so it was in a different spot all along and yada yada yada....not bad for a story but no, there's no historical truth in any stories like that....

Cheers,
Adam.

[kensei]

I did see a book once though (an actual historical work, not a tabloid) that had a genuine photo of the iceberg that Titanic hit, taken as I recall within a couple of days after the sinking. The ice had paint stains on it.